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“Machine learning today is usually self-managed and on premises, requiring the training and expertise of data scientists. However, data scientists are in short supply, commercial software licenses can be expensive and popular programming languages for statistical computing have a steep learning curve. Even if a business could overcome these hurdles, deploying new machine learning models in production systems often requires months of engineering investment. Scaling, managing and monitoring these production systems requires the capabilities of a very sophisticated engineering organization, which few enterprises have today.

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, a fully-managed cloud service for building predictive analytics solutions, helps overcome the challenges most businesses have in deploying and using machine learning. How? By delivering a comprehensive machine learning service that has all the benefits of the cloud. In mere hours, with Azure ML, customers and partners can build data-driven applications to predict, forecast and change future outcomes – a process that previously took weeks and months.”

The clear message from Microsoft for SharePoint 2013 development is a move to the app model. Here’s an introduction: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj164084.aspx. SharePoint 2013 apps moves your code assemblies out of the SharePoint platform and into separate web applications. There are two reason for this:

1. A requirement for a more stable SharePoint platform. If you’re running SharePoint across your organization you don’t want badly written applications impacting reliability.

2. In Office 365 you can only add assemblies in sandboxed solutions. However, because of the very constrained subset of the SharePoint API available to such solutions their functionality is limited. Now, Office 365 will use functionality provided by SharePoint apps.

The move to SharePoint 2013 brings SharePoint 2013 developers fully back into the ASP.NET development fold. In particular, MVC with Razor greatly simplifies web application development. You will be using the SharePoint Client Object Model to access SharePoint objects from your app.

Here are some links that help you get started with building SharePoint 2013 apps:

Of the parts of animals some are simple: to wit, all such as divide
into parts uniform with themselves, as flesh into flesh; others are
composite, such as divide into parts not uniform with themselves,
as, for instance, the hand does not divide into hands nor the face
into faces.
And of such as these, some are called not parts merely, but limbs
or members. Such are those parts that, while entire in themselves,
have within themselves other diverse parts: as for instance, the head,
foot, hand, the arm as a whole, the chest; for these are all in themselves
entire parts, and there are other diverse parts belonging to them.

Talking of tools (see Favorite SharePoint Development Tools), the SharePoint Diagnostic Studio from Microsoft provides SharePoint performance monitoring functionality. This tool is particularly useful for consolidating the ULS records across servers in a SharePoint server farm. It’s part of the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit v2.0.

While useful, the user interface is not particularly polished or easy to use. In particular, the SharePoint Diagnostic Studiomust be run with the language set to “US-English”, otherwise date formats will be presented incorrectly and date/time filtering will not work.